Science and Culture Today | Page 1319 | Discovering Design in Nature

This post is the second in a series reviewing the February 15, 2009 session at the AAAS annual meeting, Why Evolution Makes Sense of Biology. The first post is here.

David Deamer: Why Evolution Makes Sense of Biochemistry

…so-called prebiotic chemistry, which is of course falsely named, because we have no reason to believe that what they’re doing would ever lead to life — I just call it ‘investigator influenced abiotic organic chemistry’…

Robert Shapiro, Chemistry (NYU), at the roundtable “Life, What A Concept!” (p. 92), August 2007

First to the podium following Joshua Rosenau of the NCSE was David Deamer, a biochemist and leading origin of life researcher from UC-Santa Cruz. After outlining the Darwinian historical context — the famous “warm little pond” of Darwin’s 1871 letter to Hooker — and probable early Earth geochemistry, Deamer asked his motivating question: “What is needed for evolution itself to begin?”

What follows directly below is a summary, with links, of Deamer’s talk, as he answers his motivating question. I then offer some critical reflections.

In a stunningly biased headline this week, The Washington Post said “Obama Aims to Shield Science from Politics.” Well that is certainly one interpretation of the Administration’s announcement that it will fund new embryo-destructive research! Of course, this is nothing new. It has been an anti-Bush mantra of the hard Left for some years now that there is “A Republican War on Science,” to borrow Chris Mooney’s delightfully fatuous phrase.

In the debate over how to teach evolution in public schools, we often hear Darwinists cry, “Science is not democratic.” To which I’ve heard John West sagely reply a thousand times, “But public policy is!”

The recent headlines, and the Administration’s own rhetoric, regarding the President’s decision to have taxpayers (many of whom are morally opposed) fund new embryo-destructive research display the same naiveté in demarcating politics and science. It seems not to occur to certain folks that the answer to the question, “Is it good policy to Federally fund embryo-destructive research?” is not a scientific one. Rather, this sort of answer involves questions of a moral and prudential (political) nature.

As Robert George and Eric Cohen note, the new President’s position is itself highly political:

[Note: For a more comprehensive defense of Ben Stein’s documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, please see: NCSE Exposed at NCSEExposed.org] Alas, poor Richard. Ever since being thrashed by Ben Stein in Expelled he’s just gotten more and more nonsensical. Then, it was that there is no intelligent design of life, except of course maybe alien-directed intelligent design. Now, it seems he has decided to follow some recent sage advice and avoid using the “d” word. And, he’s scrapped his previous idea of using designoid as a replacement. Then Dawkins got to the essential framework of the rest of his talk, making a distinction within purpose between the purpose that comes about as adaptation via natural selection, which he called “archi-purpose”, Read More ›

The debate that isn’t supposed to exist in science continues in the science journal Genetics, where Michael Behe’s book, The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism, generated a response in the form of a paper by Rick Durrett and Deena Schmidt, “Waiting for two mutations: with applications to regulatory sequence evolution and the limits of Darwinian evolution.” In their effort to refute Behe’s claims, Durrett and Schmidt get a few things wrong, which Behe is able to point out in a reply published in Genetics, which Durrett and Schmidt also responded to in the journal. What we have here is a full-fledged debate over the limits of Darwinian evolution, a debate that Behe raised with his Read More ›

At the risk of sounding a brief religious note and therefore inviting from ID critics the usual (and so extremely logical!) inference that Discovery Institute supports theocratic rule, let’s consider for a moment the message of Purim. That Jewish festival is upon us today and, with its themes of randomness versus a guiding providence at work in history, it happens to be an excellent time for reflecting on themes relevant to ENV.

Celebrated with lots of eating, drinking, and charitable and other gift-giving, Purim recalls the events told in the Bible’s book of Esther. In the story, which is very much screenplay-ready, a conniving minister to the king of Persia uses his influence on the monarch to plot the destruction of the Jewish people. This fascinating villain, Haman, is no mere mindless anti-Semite. He is motivated by his own views about life’s ultimate meaning, or the lack thereof — a secular theology, a religion of a kind that’s precisely opposite to Biblical faith.

According to Scriptural tradition, Haman was a descendant of the Bible’s personification of wickedness, the mysterious tribe called Amalek. As recounted in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy, Amalek, seemingly without reason, fell upon and slaughtered many Jews. That was back when the children of Israel were living in the desert, following their exodus from Egypt.

Actually, Amalek’s attack was not without reason. The Hebrew text associates Amalek with the word “keri,” which means a chance or random event: “Remember what Amalek did unto thee by the way, when ye were come forth out of Egypt; How he happened upon thee (karecha) by the way, and smote the hindmost of thee, even all that were feeble behind thee, when thou wast faint and weary; and he feared not God” (Deuteronomy 25:17-18). The same Hebrew verbal root can mean to “cool” someone’s ardor, put a chill in his faith.

Timothy Sandefur, a Panda’s Thumb contributor and an atheist, is a leader in the Darwinist crusade to censor balanced discussion of evolutionary theory in science classrooms. Mr Sandefur responded to my open letter to the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, a Darwinist organization that lobbies for censorship of discussion of the weaknesses of evolution in public schools and has boycotted the citizens of Louisiana because they recently passed legislation protecting academic freedom in public schools.

Mr. Sandefur begins his post with a sneer:

With the possible exception of Casey Luskin, no Discovery Institute fellow seems more eager to embarrass himself in public than Michael Egnor…

I always strive to be more embarrassing than Casey, but now it seems I’ll have to try harder. Here goes.

Mr. Sandefur asserts:

The problem with creationism is precisely that creationists like Dr. Egnor want their religion to be taught in government classrooms.

Mr. Sandefur misrepresents my views, which I have explained at length on this blog for several years and will now explain again.

This is my viewpoint on evolution:

I am a Christian and I believe that God created man and the universe. The Bible isn’t a science textbook, although it does offer insight into truth about the natural world. Reason, one form of which is science, can lead us to important truths about nature. I believe that faith and reason cannot ultimately be in conflict, because God is the source of both.

I believe that the earth is ~4.5 billion years old, and the universe is ~14 billion years old. Universal common ancestry is a reasonable inference from the evidence, and life evolved over several billion years. Some aspects of life arose by random variation and natural selection, and some aspects of life (e.g. the genetic code, molecular nanotechnology) show evidence for design by intelligent agency.

Oklahoma State Representative Todd Thomsen has filed a resolution in the Oklahoma State Legislature asking the University of Oklahoma to dis-invite Richard Dawkins, who was invited to speak at the university as a part of the university’s Darwin 200th birthday celebration. The proposed resolution reads:

P.Z. Myers at Pharyngula has responded to my open letter to the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology. In my letter, I strongly criticized the Darwinist organization’s endorsement of censorship and its disrespect for academic freedom. I reminded its members that they have a responsibility to the millions of taxpayers who fund their grants, and part of that responsibility entails a modicum of respect and a willingness to accept an open discussion of evolutionary theory in public schools.

Myers replies: